Black Shark 2 is the smartphone that could change portable gaming forever

Chinese company Black Shark has today launched its new gaming smartphone, the Black Shark 2, with hopes to revolutionise the portable gaming industry.

Rocking a monster of a processor in the Snapdragon 855 and up to 12GB of RAM, this smartphone offers some serious performance power that may well break smartphone benchmark records. The 256GB storage should also ensure you never run out of space for a massive library of downloads.

Black Shark has taken extra steps to try to ensure this gaming smartphone won’t become a flaming lump of metal following hours of intensive play, by incorporating a direct touch liquid cooling system. This sees a liquid cooling plate installed, while separating the components via various layers to keep temperatures as cool as possible.

A slew of other gaming-centric features have also been integrated into the Black Shark 2, including a Full HD 6.39-inch AMOLED screen that features incredibly low latency, with a response time of just 43.5ms for super-smooth visuals. This is claimed to be the lowest ever latency found on a touchscreen found on a smartphone.

The screen also supports a technology that Black Shark calls ‘Master Touch’. This effectively works the same as Apple’s 3D Touch technology, enabling users to use a hard press as secondary input instead of an on-screen button.

As an example, this would allow gamers to use a hard press to fire a gun, so their thumb would never need to leave the screen when switching between firing and aiming. Black Shark suggests this could save gamers at least 80ms, which may sound insignificant, but could well be the difference between victory and death.

A whopping 4000mAh battery will, according to Black Shark, allow for for up to five hours of play on a single charge while playing an intensive mobile game such as PUBG or Fortnite. For reference, that’s longer than the Nintendo Switch’s average battery life. Fast charging is also supported here, with Black Shark claiming that five minutes spent hooked up to the mains will give you 30 minutes of play time.

Black Shark also revealed a bunch of excited accessories that work with the smartphone, including a pair of controllers that can attach to the sides just like the Joy Cons on the Nintendo Switch. A case has also been shown off, featuring an extra fan to keeps things cool, as well as a subwoofer to give the audio more boom.

Right now, the Black Shark 2 is only available in Chinese markets, but will soon be heading over to conquer Europe and the USA. There’s no word on a European launch date just yet, but UK prices have been confirmed with the base model Black Shark 2costing £360 and the most expensive configuration priced at £475. Judging specs alone, those prices look very reasonable.

Are you excited by the potential of the Black Shark 2? Let us know on Twitter @TrustedReviews.